The 1857
Phonautograph
of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville

"In preparing the ear for use as a phonautograph, the roof of the
cavity of the middle ear is first cut away; through this opening a
narrow-bladed knife may be introduced to divide the tendon on the
tensor tympani muscle and the articulation of the incus with the
stapes. By means of a hair-saw a section
of the middle ear is then made from before backward through the divided
articulation. The section removes the inner wall of the middle ear
cavity with the portion of the bone containing the internal ear and
exposes the inner surface of the drum membrane, with the malleus and
incus attached…"

"…In using a preparation of the
ear as a phonautograph, a stylus made of a single fibre of wheat-straw
is glued to the descending part of the small bones, parallel to the
long axis of the bond. With this, tracings may be made upon a plate of
smoked glass, sliding upon a glass bed at a right angle to the line of
excision of the drum membrane, and moved by clock work or a falling
weight, as in the apparatus mentioned by Professor Bell…"

(From a web site of Jonathan Sterne which no longer seems to be
available)

A
phonautograph was a device for converting sound into visible
traces.
Usually this was accomplished by rigging up a needle or brush hair to a
membrane and allowing the needle or hair to scratch smoked glass as the
membrane vibrated.Source

"Articulate sounds are accompanied by the explusion of air from
the mouth,
which impulses vary in

quantity, pressure, and in the degree of suddennes with which
they commence
and terminate."

"An instrument which will record these impulses has been termed
by its inventor,
Léon Scott, a phonautograph, or phonograph, and by Mr. Barlow a
logograph; the pressure of air in speaking is directed against a
membrane
which vibrates and carries with it a delicate marker, which traces a
line
on a traveling ribbon. The excursions of the tracer are great or small
from the base line, which represents the quiet membrane, according to
the
force of the impulse; and are prolonged according to the duration of
the
pressure, different articulate sounds varying greatly in their length
as
well as in intensity; farther, another great difference in them
consists
in the relative abruptness of the rising and falling inflections, which
make curves of various shapes, of even or irregular shape. The
smoothness
or ruggedness of a sound has thus its own graphic character,
independent
both of its actual intensity and its length.

An Advanced Phonoautograph: The
1909 Phonodiek of Dayton C. Millersource

"For
the
investigation of certain tone qualities…(Professor Miller)
required records of sound waves
showing greater detail than had heretofore been obtained.
The result of many
experiments was the development of
an instrument which photographically records sound waves,
and which in a modified form may be used to project such
waves on a screen for public demonstration; this instrument
has been named the "Phonodeik," meaning to show or exhibit sound. "

"The sensitive receiver of the phonodeik is a
diaphragm, d, (figure below), of
thin glass placed at the end of a resonator horn h; behind the
diaphragm is a minute steel spindle mounted in jeweled bearings,
to which is attached a tiny mirror m; one part of the spindle
is fashioned ino a small pulley; a few silk fibers, or a
platinum wire 0.0005 inch in diameter, is attached to the center of the
diaphragm and
being wrapped once around the pulley is fastened to a
spring tension piece."

"Light from a pinhole l is focused by a lens and
reflected by the mirror to a moving film f in a special
camera. If the diaphragm moves under the action of
a sound wave, the mirror is rotated by an amound
proportional to the motion, and the spot of light traces the record
of the sound wave on the film.

"In the instrument
made for photography… the usual displacement of the diaphragm for
sounds of ordinary loudness is about half a thousandth of
an inch, resulting in an extreme motion of one thousandth of an inch,
which is magnified 2500 times on the photograph by the mirror
and light ray, giving a record 2 1/2 inches wide; the film
commonly employed is 5 inches wide, and the record is
sometimes wider than this. The extreme movement of the
diaphragm of a thousandth of an inch must include
all the small variations of motion corresponding to the
fine details of the wave form which represent musical quality."

Phonodiek Pictures of
Musical
Sounds

Shows four wave traces of flute, clarinet, oboe, saxophone
tones made using
the phonodiek c. 1916. Dayton C. Miller photographed the wave
forms
of each of four instruments as they produced a 256 Hz note--C3,
"middle"
C. Note how the phonodiek shows the differences between the tone
quality of the four woodwinds. The flute, which does not have a
reed,
produces a note with fewer overtones and a simpler wave form in the
photograph.
(See Professor
Dayton
Miller's
Research in Accoustics).

The My Fair
Lady Connection

From
the James Burke, "Connections" column entitled Highbrow
Stuff
(Scientific
American,
May 1996).

"…in the 1850s… Isaac Pitman and his business partners…(were
promoting)…
a totali nu wei uv speling Inglish. Alas, their efforts came to
naught
(or nought), and they switched instead to selling correspondence
courses
for a phonetically based writing technique we now know as shorthand.

"Pitman's original reason for attempting to turn English into
WYSIWYG was
because it isn't. Try pronouncing from parts American, Australian, New
Zealander, Canadian or South African. (Give up? It's "Fanshaw.") Pitman
believed that world peace would be more rapidly achieved if, by making
words such as "Featherstonehaugh" simpler to read and pronounce, all
those
foreign "johnnies" could be more easily exposed to the "civilizing"
influence
of English.

"…The idea took root, although on a much grander scale than the
single-minded
Pitman might have hoped for, and in 1897 it flowered as the
International
Phonetic Alphabet. Which made every language easier to read and
pronounce.

"Top gun in phonetics was Henry Sweet,
after whom
George Bernard Shaw modeled Professor Higgins in Pygmalion (a.k.a. My
Fair
Lady). As it happens, in the play, Higgins notes down the character
Eliza's
speech patterns using "visible speech," another set of symbols that had
been developed long before by Alexander Graham Bell's father, an
elocution
teacher who had been a founding member of the British Phonetics
Council.
By the 1870s Bell, Jr., was busy visualizing sound, too, for the deaf
students
he was teaching in Boston.

"It was at this juncture that he came across a thing called a
phonautograph,
developed by the otherwise entirely forgotten E. Leon Scott de
Martinville.
The device was fairly primitive: a membrane vibrated in reaction to
speech,
and a bristle attached to the other side of the membrane traced wiggly
marks on a moving piece of smoked glass. With the phonautograph,
Bell was able to show his pupils the correct "shape" of the sound they
were trying to make, so that they could then compare their own attempts
to imitate it.

"The whole wiggly-line phenomenon probably had its origin
in an
invention
years earlier by a French physiologist by the name of Etienne J. Marey
(Source-1
and Source-2),
who fitted a membrane on a tiny drum (a "tambour") and placed this
device
wherever he wanted vital rhythms to be turned into graphs. When
pressure
of any kind depressed the membrane, the air in the tambour would be
forced
along a tube to push against a membrane fitted to another tambour at
the
far end of the tube. A stylus mounted on this second membrane would
move
in response and trace a line. With the tambour, still in general
medical
use as late as 1955, Marey could reduce virtually any kind of
physiological
vibrations to lines. He

Bell's phonautograph: a.)
Smoked-glass tracings of
vowel sounds obtained with an AGB phonautograph. b.) AGB's human-ear
phonautograph
with which he experimented in Brantford. (From A History of
Engineering
and Science in the Bell System: The Early Years (1875-1925), Bell
Telephone
Laboratories, Inc. (Larger
picture
phonautograph)

A model of Koenig manometer capsule (see
above) which Bell displayed at the Centennial Exposition in
1876.
In this version, the diaphram is actuated by an electromagnetic coil
through
which voice currents flow. In the unit used by Bell in 1874, the
voice was directed to the diaphragm by a speaking tube. (From A
History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: The Early Years
(1875-1925), Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.)